Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:02:41.927Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

De-censoring an Iranian-American “Memoir”: Authorship and Synchronicity in Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Marie Ostby
Marie Ostby*
Affiliation:
English Department at the University of Virginia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the literature of the Iranian-American diaspora, the memoir genre has become a predominant lens through which Western audiences “read” contemporary Iran. While many bestselling life narratives have relied on hostage crisis-era tropes of gendered repression and subsequent liberation in exile, new amalgams of style and theme, distortions of perspective, and complicated renderings of the “subject” are now beginning to cross borders. One of these is Shahriar Mandanipour's 2009 novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which this paper examines as an auto-fictional commentary on the memoir genre that both arises from and responds directly to censorship using a self-referential and layered text. Through three central dialectics—ambiguous violence, encoded desire and resistance to diachronic historicization alongside the nation—this paper demonstrates how Mandanipour's auto-fictional and often magical realist attempts elude what Gillian Whitlock terms the transnational “economy of affect” that publicizes, protects and ultimately drives the reception of memoir across borders.

Type
Iranian Diaspora Studies
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 73 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Mandanipour, Shahriar, Censoring an Iranian Love Story: A Novel, trans. Khalili, Sara (New York: Knopf, 2009)Google Scholar.

2 Such as Azar Nafisi, Shirin Ebadi, Haleh Esfandiari and others.

3 Whitlock, Gillian, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Hamid Dabashi, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 797 (2006), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm.

5 Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 73.

6 Ibid., 77.

7 Dabashi, “Native Informers.”

8 Terada, Rei, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 “PEN American Center—Authors. Shahriar Mandanipour,” http://www.pen.org/author.php/prmAID/155.

10 Mandanipour, Censoring, 5.

11 Ibid., 165.

12 Ibid., 212.

14 Ibid., 223.

13 Ibid., 30.

15 Ibid., 266.

16 Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 26–7Google Scholar.

17 Mandanipour, Censoring, 56.

18 Ibid., 65.

19 Ibid., 17.

20 Ibid., 143.

21 Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 84.

22 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 308Google Scholar.

23 Mandanipour, Censoring, 17.

24 Ibid., 277–8.

25 Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

26 Mandanipour, Censoring, 3.

27 Virno, Paolo, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” trans. Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Virno, Paolo and Hardt, Michael (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 208Google Scholar.

28 Butler, Judith, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Fuss, Diana (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 29Google Scholar.

29 Mandanipour, Censoring, 8.

30 Ibid., 88.

31 Ibid., 140.

32 Ibid., 27.

33 Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 16.

34 Hedayat, Sadegh, The Blind Owl, trans. Costello, D.P. (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 9–12Google Scholar.

35 Mandanipour, Censoring, 161.

36 Ibid., 137.

37 Ibid., 46.

38 Ibid., 162.

39 Ibid., 188–91.

40 Ibid., 286.

41 Ibid., 289–91.

42 Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 6.

43 Ibid., 8.

44 Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 15.

45 Mandanipour, Censoring, 291.

46 Ibid., 291.

47 Ibid., 294.

48 Ibid., 59.

49 Ibid., 170.

50 Motlagh, Amy, “Autobiography and Authority in the Writings of the Iranian Diaspora,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 31, no. 2 (2011): 411–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Jonathan R. Greenberg, “Ken Saro-Wiva, 1941–1995,” African Postcolonial Literature in English in the Postcolonial Web, http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sarowiwa/sarowiwabio.html.

52 Rachlin, Nahid, Persian Girls: A Memoir (New York: Tarcher, 2006), 128Google Scholar.

53 Mandanipour, Censoring, 185.

54 Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 27–8Google Scholar.

55 Esther Allen, “Doors, Windows, and the Office of Foreign Assets Control,” Words Without Borders, http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/doors-windows-and-the-office-of-foreign-assets-control/.

56 Mandanipour, Censoring, 15.

57 Shahriar Mandanipour, “In Iran, Generation Must Speak to Generation,” Guardian July 3, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/03/iran-islamic-revolution-coup.

58 Mandanipour, Censoring, 14.

59 Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York and Toronto: Random House, 2003)Google Scholar.

60 Felski, Rita, Uses of Literature (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Mandanipour, Censoring, 145.

62 Wood, James, “Book Review: Love, Iranian Style,” New Yorker, June 29, 2009, 75Google Scholar.

63 Mandanipour, Censoring, 247.

64 Ibid., 8.

65 Ibid., 142.

66 Gilmore, Leigh, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 368.

68 Ghahramani, Zarah, My Life as a Traitor, with Hillman, Robert (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)Google Scholar.

69 Ebadi, Shirin, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, with Moaveni, Azadeh (New York: Random House, 2006), 216Google Scholar.

70 Mandanipour, Censoring, 228, 241.

71 Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 24.

72 Mandanipour, Censoring, 285.

73 Wood, “Love, Iranian Style,” 72.

74 Mandanipour, Censoring, 294–5.

75 Ibid., 285.

76 Ibid., 216, 228.

77 Ibid., 281–2.

78 Ibid., 143.